El Reg Street View snappers caught on camera

Surveillance feedback loops threaten fabric of time and space

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It's been live for less than a week, but Google's Street View has already got the press and privacy outfits in a bit of a tizz over the possible implications of having the UK's highways and byways, and indeed the citizens unfortunate enough to have been walking Blighty's leafy boulevards when the Orwellian Opel came a-calling, plastered across cyberspace.

Amid all the hand-wringing, however, there are some resolute souls who care not one jot if they're nailed by the search monolith's roving spymobiles: The El Reg counter-surveillance surveillance operatives, who submitted snaps to our now-legendary snoopcar sighting mashup:

Well, following the first spot of what we have dubbed a "surveillance feedback loop", we received further examples of the watchers being watched by the watchers who in turn find themselves being watched on Street View.

Our initial plan was to pin these incidents to a new Web 0.2 mashup, but no sooner had we connected the first test shot back on itself using a Street View link to create a self-referring closed reciprocal photographic image bounce, than someone from the Vulture Central particle physics lab ran screaming to the server room and hit the very big red button which closes down all third-party apps.

The reason, we gather, is that by plugging a surveillance feedback loop into the internet, it's possible for the logic resonance to grow at an exponential rate to such a degree that it becomes self-aware within twenty minutes and rips apart the very fabric of time and space in a desperate attempt to escape into a dimension where Google doesn't own absolutely everything.